I am currently looking for Thin Clients on ebay to use as my main server instead of the RPi 4 with an external USB drive.

I found decent offers for:

  • Dell Optiplex 3020M with i5-4590T 4GB RAM 120GB SSD
  • Dell Wyse 5070 with Celeron J4105 or Pentium Silver J5005 both with 8GB RAM 64GB SSD

Given the current prices of new hardware my questions are:

  • Should I go for 8GB RAM?
  • Or are 4GB RAM fine and I should take double the storage?

Things I want to run on this server:

  • Karakeep
  • FreshRSS
  • Paperless-NGX or Papra
  • Immich
  • Booklore

Because I plan to mostly use podman I tried to check for virtualization and all three suppoert Intels VT-x technolgy, will that be fine for my use case?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    18 hours ago

    I would go for the Wyse 5070 as a server. More RAM is good and the CPUs while somewhat slower are more power efficient.

    The 4/5th gen Intel CPUs are the last gen that is really quite poor in power efficiency when mostly idling. 6/7gen made huge improvements in that regard.

    Upgrading the storage should be possible quite easily.

    • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        At some point the benefit of extra RAM isn’t there anymore compared to what the CPU can actually run. With a CPU like that 8GB is probably sufficient and 16 would be merely nice to have for some additional caching.

  • mrnobody@reddthat.comEnglish
    10·
    22 hours ago

    Immich needs RAM so opt for more RAM if possible. I’m using Yunohost on an old box and have 8GB and Immich uses about 4-5 with all advanced features off.

    • Buck@jlai.luEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I don’t know what up with your Immich instance but this seems like a lot of RAM usage for me. I have 45 docker containers, including Immich, running on a 10 yo NUC with 8 GB of RAM and that’s not an issue… I use 4,7 GB total in this instant.

    • dallen@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I’m running Immich on an old ThinkCentre with the default feature set. Currently looking at:

      • Server: 1.4 GB
      • ML: 288 MB
      • Valkey: 8 MB
      • Postgres: ~500 MB

      There is a bit more overhead for the control plane and cloud-native PG operator/backup pods but my instance fits comfortably inside a ~4GB allocation.

  • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    9·
    22 hours ago

    A slower CPU sucks, but swapping sucks even more. Is the ram upgradeable? You can get 16gb ddr3 sticks of ram. Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.

    • theorangeninja@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      After a rather quick look it seems like the DDR3 prices are still kinda fine. I will consider that, thanks!

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      22 hours ago

      For ddr3 in the US it’s not terrible. The new stuff for datacenters is all ddr5, and anyone who can’t get ddr5 is settling for ddr4, so ddr3 should be relatively cheap and available.

    • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      Idk how much EOL/the ram pocalypse has affected their pricing though.

      I get mine from Memory Stock. Great service, good prices. I’ve never had a bad experience with them.

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
    3·
    20 hours ago

    Always go with more ram. I can say that from experience.

    I’m partial to fanless, but keep in mind my empire of dirt is almost entirely fanless so I’m just partial to it.